One of my classes this semester is centered around Character Design. I thought this class would be a breeze, since character design is one of my favourite things. I love drawing full body portraits of characters, exploring all the details of their costume and colour palettes. However, the first assignment for this class was a bit of a struggle for me in terms of the media.
We were required to complete all our work using traditional media, and at the beginning of the class I had never properly tried traditional art, with nearly all of my work being done digitally, so the skill difference was quite hard for me to deal with.
When I first started with basic sketches and life drawing, I mostly used mechanical pencil, which felt quite dull and I didn’t really connect with it. After looking into some artists I followed online and really liked, I realised a lot of them use inks, with a large emphasis on contrast between black and white. After giving this a go myself in my life drawing studies I really started enjoying traditional drawing, so I decided to use inks/pens as my main medium.
Knowing we had to have colour in our final designs, I experimented with my Copic markers on top of the ink, and this worked out well, though I had to be careful to let the ink fully dry so it didn’t smudge. My final process was to sketch out the design lightly with pencil, then use an ink pen to line over the top of the sketch and fill in any large black areas with a mixture of ink and black Copic. After letting the lines dry, I coloured over the top with Copic markers.
While I'm not fully happy with the end result, It was a really fun experiment for me, and I'm glad I had the chance to be pushed into trying traditional art, though I'll probably still be sticking to digital art in the future.